Writing

With several stories out there in the hands of editors waiting for acceptance or rejection (including one I spent six years writing) I find that my biggest problem isn’t anxiety, it’s figuring out how to write “and then I woke up” (or similar) a third of the way through the story I’m working on now without my readers thinking everything so far was just a dream. I’m horrified that the exact right phrase I need is a goddamn cliché. It’s things like this that drive writers to drink. That, and spending six years trying to get a ten page story just right.

Often many of the most important choices a writer can make about a work of fiction are unconscious ones; the decision to use first or third person narration can seem more like intuition than anything else. There are times when I agonize over it, particularly when I’m heavily invested in the raw material (if I’m writing in the semi-autobiographical mode, for example). It’s not enough that it “feel right”; the choices I make also have to work with whatever point I’m trying to make, with whatever themes I’ve (consciously) chosen to include. For A Temporary Life, my novel-in-progress, one of the themes—or maybe it’s more accurate to say “problems”—I’m working with is that of memory. Using the first person form of narration came most naturally, but I’m not satisfied with how most writers present dialogue in first person narratives. Let me give you an example from a book I actually… Continue Reading →

Most of the writers I know who are either barely published (like myself) or as yet entirely unpublished live in mortal terror of two possibilities. First, that no-one out there will like their work and their masterpiece will never find the home it deserves, and second, that their work isn’t any good at all and their work will never find a home at all. I alternate between one fear and the other with occasional confident bursts that border on arrogance. As I see things at the moment, there are two options open. We can persevere, if only slowly like myself, and continue to send our typescripts* to journals and agents and publishers. The other option is to self-publish. I respect this option, but rarely will I support it with my dollars. It’s not that I believe there is no such thing as a good self-published book, or that there are… Continue Reading →

I’m a writer. People know this about me, though I haven’t published very much, and nothing outside of this blog for a while now. It’s not entirely for lack of trying, although that is certainly part of it. The reason I’m not trying to get published right now is because I have, for the time being, given up on short fiction and am trying my hand at a novel. After two years of work, I’m on chapter three. From that statement you can learn that I’ve successfully passed the major “first chapter” hurdle, and that my biggest problem is maintaining momentum. Thank God I’ve only planned on a total of ten chapters. Even when my momentum is at its best I work quite slowly. I don’t bring this up because I want congratulations or criticism. I bring this up because I want to start posting about the process, about the… Continue Reading →